This invention relates to a weapon magazine including a magazine housing formed of two parallel side walls, front and rear walls, as well as a bottom plate and further has a feeder plate advanced by a follower spring supported on the base plate inside the housing.
Weapon magazines of the above-outlined type are known and are disclosed, for example, in Swiss patent Nos. 481,361 and 500,462. In view of the fact that particularly combat ammunition of high muzzle velocity has cartridge casings whose diameter is, at the base of the casing, greater than at its end which surrounds the bullet, difficulties have been encountered in designing the magazine for accommodating an increased amount of cartridges.
Because of the non-uniform diameter of the cartridges the magazine housing is arcuate so that in the magazine the bullet tips are, at least approximately, oriented towards a common point. An increase of the quantity of cartridges in the magazine could be effected by stacking the cartridges in two rows so that present-day magazines are generally of a capacity of thirty cartridges.
Since automatic precision weapons are used with increasing frequency instead of earlier rapid-fire machine guns, the above-discussed disadvantange of limited cartridge capacity per magazine has become increasingly pronounced. In order to increase the cartridge capacity it is known to secure together two magazines by means of a wire or adhesive strip. For exchanging the emptied magazine with a charged one, the marksman, after removing the empty magazine had to turn the two interconnected magazines around for correctly orienting the charged magazine for insertion into the weapon. A 180.degree. rotation of the two magazines has been disadvantageous since such an operation had to be carried out with a single hand, whereby risks of dropping and thus soiling the magazines were very high.